GNOME 3: The Future of the Linux Desktop Revealed - page 2

Renovation and Evolution

December 8, 2009

By
Sean Michael Kerner

As part of that shell, Walters added that there could also be a mechanism for Firefox style extensions in the coming iterations of GNOME. The goal for the new extensions mechanism will be to lower the barrier to entry for developers to easily extend the GNOME user interface.

The larger goal for the GNOME 3 shell is to get users to their content more quickly than before.

"We want to allow the user to focus on what it is they are trying to do and not distracting them with buslls*** or what we more politely call administrative debris," McCann said.

In that category of debris, McCann puts unneeded buttons, widgets and notification items that aren't interesting and don't help users to get at what they're actually trying to do.

"We want to get to a Web page, we want to talk to people, those are things we really want to do and are things that satisfy our desires," McCann said. "Having a box on the screen with a button in it or a bar at the bottom does not satisfy me in any way. These are just artifacts of trying to solve something else."

McCann added that Google's in-development ChromeOS as well as Palm's WebOS and Apple iPhone are taking a similar route.

Clearing the administrative debris involves removing many of the constant notifications that GNOME users see on their desktops. Part of the plan is to bring messaging right into the core of the interface, according toMcCann.

"We want to bring networking and specifically chat directly into the interface," he said. "The goal is to put [the] user back in control of their computing experience."

GNOME 3 is currently scheduled to be released in the fall of 2010, but a technology preview could be in the Fedora 13 release, which is set for release in May of 2010, McCann said.